


corporeal symphonies

by hellbeast



Series: i'll never forget you (this is my only joy) [2]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Barely Canon Compliant, Cass and Jay's Excellent Adventure, Continuity What Continuity, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 22:44:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6169553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellbeast/pseuds/hellbeast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassandra wakes up flying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	corporeal symphonies

Cassandra wakes up flying.

It’s—disconcerting, a little alarming. A lot alarming. Very alarming. The wind is pulling hard on her cape, and it sounds like the leathery snap of wings. She can’t quite remember what she had been doing before, but now there is nothing but the air whipping around her and trees and the sound of water nearby and the ground, rapidly approaching. She barely manages to slow her trajectory, scrabbling desperately at passing branches and leaves.

There—one arm stretched out, rough bark tearing at her palm, leaves snagged from their branches. She swings. She hits a tree—oak, maybe— _hard_. Leaves rustle in her wake, branches creak.

She doesn’t know this forest at all. There aren’t any forests in Gotham, only parks, and it seems too rooted to be anything of Ivy’s. It’s quiet, though: no birdsong, no squirrel chatter, no movement in the grass.

The forest seems to be holding its breath, curled up tight like a scared child bereft of a nightlight, waiting for something to pass. Something big, with teeth.

Behind a dense cover of foliage, there is water, a river. Not many of those in Gotham, either.

(Dick would make a quip, about not being in Kansas anymore. Or, he would, if he talked to her. Tim would make the quip in his stead, but Babs says that Tim’s delivery is always stilted. Cass wouldn’t know the difference. She’d just be glad to get the reference, just be glad to be included.)

The river gurgles and sloshes and churns and over that Cassandra can hear the wet, even thumps of something stalking from the riverbed, accompanied by the drag of wet weight over stone.

She shifts in the tree and listens.

There’s a whir and a click and the sound of metal on rock. Two sets of breathing; one unconscious, the other slow and even.

Someone begins to spit up river water.

From the foliage, a ghost emerges.

It’s a man, tall and broad, wearing tactical combat gear. His eyes are smeared with black, the same kind of mixture that Tim uses under his domino mask, and his temple is bleeding. He is favoring his side. He has a metal arm, gleaming and alien, that pulls his shoulders in. His face is blank, empty.

With every step he takes, Cass can hear the whir-click of his arm, like a jammed tape deck.

He does not look up. Cass does not move.

He walks, silent but for his arm and the soft noise of his boots on the autumn-dry grass. On the riverbank, someone groans and chokes up more water. The man never looks back, never falters.

Cass waits until she can no longer hear his footsteps before she slides down the oak and into the thick vegetation. The forest thins down to a small smattering of trees and shrubs by the riverbed. The ground is damp, almost swampy, underfoot. The river itself is wide and wholly unfamiliar. There, across the water, is heavy, dark smoke. The wind carries back the wail of sirens.

There is another man on the riverbank. He, too, has broad shoulders and seems to be wearing some kind of tactical gear, only in deep reds and blues. There is a shield—round, with a star—lying against him. This man is awake, but not aware, propped up on his elbows and gasping, spitting, choking up river water into the mud. His hair is slick to his skull and the rasp to his breathing says that he was under the water for some time.

Cass crouches, neither close nor far, and watches. The man groans and brings a hand up to his face. Cass can see his busted, bruised knuckles. Suddenly, the man shoots up—or tries to—with a strangled, “Bucky!” as though he’s only just remembered something he can’t believe he ever forgot.

Instead of a Bucky—what is a Bucky?—though, the man’s eyes roll to find Cassandra.

“Who—?”

She can only imagine how she looks to him; a small figure mired in black, wire stitching reflecting the light. Hollow, large black eyes and no mouth.

Beyond them, and rushing closer, there is the sound of a helicopter, and the wet glide of a boat over water, and someone with a hoarse voice, who starts to yell, “Cap! Cap, are you there!”

Another voice calls, “ _Steve!_ ”

“Wait!” The man with the shield tries, arm stretching out, reaching, but Cassandra has already leapt into the trees and away.

* * *

Cassandra does not know where she is.

No, wait, this is a lie.

She is in Washington, DC. She originally woke up flying, _falling_ , somewhere over the Potomac.

But—

Well.

It’s easy to do recon. She raids a handful of clothes collection bins and acquires an old canvas bag and a few changes of clothes. She sleeps up in the trees at the National Mall. Posing as a civilian is still strange, and largely uncomfortable, but she doesn’t have to entertain much conversation and gathering intel is a simple matter of finding a recent newspaper.

That part isn’t hard.

According to the newspaper, it’s August of 2013, which she was expecting. But all the headlines are about CAPTAIN AMERICA and SHIELD and THE BLACK WIDOW and HYDRA, which she was… not.

She recognizes the man with the shield as Captain America, for all that she’s never heard of him. In one edition, there is a grainy photo of two men fighting on an abandoned highway, and she is able to pick out the ghost man as well.

Three days after she leaves Captain America behind—choking on river water and shaking like a leaf—someone sits down across from her, pulling the metal café chair away from the table with a scrape.

“Please,” they say, voice droll, “tell me you know what’s goin’ on.”

Cass doesn’t look up from the newspaper. She lifts one shoulder in a shrug, then spins the paper so they can read the headline.

CAPTAIN AMERICA UNCOVERS HYDRA PLOT WITHIN SHIELD, the paper screams. There is a large, clear picture of the man with the shield, taken some time after Cass found him, if the bandages and sling are anything to go by. It had taken her a couple frustrating days to take the sentence apart, to figure it out. Letters are still hard, these days, and words harder still.

“I have no idea who that is.”

Cass looks up.

Jason—worn leather jacket, black jeans, messy hair and sharp eyes—meets her gaze, but only for a second.

“Alright,” he admits, sliding a paper coffee cup across the table like an offering, “Maybe I got some idea.”

* * *

Exchanging information with Jason is an interesting experience.

Cass doesn’t know much about Jason—no, that’s not it. Cass doesn’t _know_ Jason: Bruce isn’t one to talk about the past, for all that he ruminates on it, and Babs can be tight-lipped when she wants to. Cass knows _about_ Jason; about Joker, and Talia and the Lazarus Pit and about the Red Hood. But she’s only ever spoken to him once or twice, and never in such an amicable setting.

He’s—nice.

Well.

He talks smooth and quick, and he curses more often than not, and sometimes his voice gets rough and dangerous, but he brought her hot cocoa because she 'didn't strike him as a caffeine addict' and he doesn’t lie to her. He doesn’t seem angry or frustrated or upset that he’s doing almost all of the talking and reading. He keeps up a running commentary of suspicious and noteworthy passersby and he has a biting sense of humor.

(He's also heavily armed, but she couldn't decide whether or not that was a plus, so she decides not to comment on it. They are very nice knives, though.)

He’s nice.

(He doesn’t expect anything from her. She won’t disappoint him. It’s _nice_.)

Between the two of them, they manage to scrape up a wealth of information from the front page article.

The story, once they piece it together, is like something from a comic book.

“Shit,” Jason laughs, but his shoulders are tense and his voice has gone low and dangerous again, “Fuckin’ Neo-Nazis.”

Cass hums, low in her throat. She can’t quite believe it either.

What is more interesting—to her and Jason, at least—is the meager information they’ve been able to piece together about the ghost man. Or, as the reports call him, the Winter Soldier.

The records of the Winter Soldier are sparse. All of the information dumped by the Black Widow—a willowy woman with bright red hair and a predator’s stare in every photo—takes them many, many coffee sessions to sift through. He shows up in the background of a fair number of prolific assassinations and disasters, but there are long stretches of time where he goes unseen or unheard.

But there's nothing about who he is, or why he was working with Hydra, or _how_ he's remained in their service for some 70 odd years.

"You saw him?" Jason asks, for what feels like the hundredth time in the past week, "He good?"

Cass shrugs, feeling vaguely irritable. She saw the Winter Soldier for all of a minute, and she'd be glad to never meet him again.

The unsettling blankness of his face as he walked away, having just pulled Captain America—by all rights, his _enemy_ —from the clutches of a watery death...

It made her think of Tim, his voice small and shuttered, as he told her how it felt to be held under the Joker's control, how he was aware but powerless, how it _hurt_. It reminded of her of Bruce, and the way he spends hours in the Batcave, dark eyes fixed on those old Robin costumes like he’s bowing at an altar. It reminds her, most recently, of Jason, and the way he runs hot and cold, poised on a knife’s edge. How his eyes sometimes lose their light, and she can all but see the Lazarus Pit reflected in them.

(She thinks of herself, and how hard it is to help instead of hurt, when she knows violence in her bones, in her blood, in her every breath. She wonders, _where would I be, if he hadn’t come?_ and then she finds it hard to meet Jason’s eyes for the rest of the day.)

Cass knows that people can change. That doesn't mean it won’t (didn’t) _hurt._

**Author's Note:**

> #write more fics about cass cain 2k16  
> [writing/art tumblr](http://manymouths.tumblr.com)


End file.
